Here's an interesting letter from Dick Armey who used to be the Republican majority leader until he retired from congress. I've always kind of liked him particularly because he was a professor of Economics before he was elected to congress. (My B.A. is in economics.) The letter is basically attacking Dr. Dobson for supporting tax increases and more government. But the interesting part is the stories he relates about Dr. Dobson:

Another Armey’s Axiom says that if it is about power, you lose. And unfortunately when it comes to James Dobson, my personal experience has been that the man is most interested in political power.

As Majority Leader, I remember vividly a meeting with the House leadership where Dobson scolded us for having failed to “deliver” for Christian conservatives, that we owed our majority to him, and that he had the power to take our jobs back. This offended me, and I told him so.

In a later meeting Dobson and a colleague came into my office to lobby against a trade bill, asking me to stop the legislation from going to the House floor. They were wrong on the issue, and I told them no. Would you at least postpone the vote, they asked? We have a direct mail fundraising letter about to go out to our membership, they said.

I wondered then if their opposition to the bill was driven less by their moral compass and more by the need to rile their membership and increase revenue. I wondered then, if these self-appointed Christian leaders, like many politicians, had come to Washington to do good, but had instead done well for themselves.

Dobson later ran an orchestrated campaign against me in my race to retain the Majority Leader post, telling my colleagues that I was not a good Christian. I prefer to leave that decision to Lord God Almighty on Judgment Day.

Maybe you can understand why I have recently been quoted referring to this person as a “bully.”

An awful lot of bad has been done in the world by using government power to try and do good. Read the rest of the letter here.

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When I first started studying the Jewish background of the New Testament, (Jesus was Jewish, attended synagogue, taught from the Hebrew Bible, was called rabbi by his disciples, spoke Hebrew.), the most surprising thing was the importance of charity in Judaism.